The Trouble With Iraq-Vietnam Analogy?

Sometimes I feel like running out into the streets screaming, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" The urges come and go as I read the plethora of ignorance and soiled-panty rhetoric among the theoretical intelligentsia amid the theoretical above-board thinkers but only find a style of spin known only to the lost minds of amnesiacs.

Case in point; "The Trouble With Iraq-Vietnam Analogy" at the Oxford Analytica. I used to think well of this group but through the years, I find myself saying about them, "Oh well."

The article in question was posted on 8/29/07 at 0600 hours and evidently, sleep deprivation resulted in ramblings on a scale of, well...there isn't a scale that can register the ramblings of theoretical educated beings.

Behold: (the whole article is not presented here because I will NOT "register")

The White House faces growing opposition to the continuing U.S. military commitment in Iraq, not the least of which is from within the congressional Republican caucus. As the policy debate has intensified, both the president and his critics have invoked the specter of the war in Vietnam--in George Bush's case, as a warning against the consequences of withdrawal.

Growing opposition? Where have these people been? The most Stalinist leaning newspaper, the New York Times has indicated, much to their chagrin, that there is growing SUPPORT for the Global War On Terror, primarily at the main front which, is in Iraq...at the moment.

Yes, both sides have brought up the issues of Vietnam but who were the first to bring it up and when the PROPER analogies were brought forth, which group began the "this isn't like Vietnam" rhetoric?

Although in many ways the analogy is inappropriate, critics of the administration frequently draw comparisons with the failed U.S. war in Vietnam to express their disillusionment over Iraq. On Aug. 22, Bush said the Vietnam experience offered the opposite lesson--that the public should not harbor any illusions that withdrawal would force "the killing to end." In fact, the U.S. experience in Vietnam provides evidence that the aftermath of withdrawal need not necessarily follow the direst predictions of those advocating a continuing U.S. commitment.

What? Could you say that in English or is this more of that "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS" tripe? Inappropriate? To whom? And why? For "smart" people, they sure don't get out much, do they? Are these people confident that the Jihadists won't mass-murder their way into power? Much like they did in Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran? And everywhere else they have been? Do they not pay attention to the bombings in Pakistan, India., London, Madrid, Indonesia and the plethora of other locales?

For you trekkies out there, these people remind me of a species that thought they were smart, having been outwitted by Jordie LaForge said, "We are not smart."

It can be argued that, as with Vietnam, it is the military presence in Iraq that is partly spurring the insurgency and providing a rallying point for anti-U.S. groups and jihadist forces in the region. Withdrawal may remove this focal point and cause some of the insurgency to dissipate, thus allowing greater opportunities for the civil hostilities to play themselves out and for Iraq to eventually stabilize and then develop politically, economically and socially. Yet, as in Cambodia, the enormous potential human cost of any "shaking out" period following withdrawal cannot be discounted.

Here we go. It's all America's fault. I suppose 91101 was America's fault. I suppose the USS Cole was America's fault. I suppose the Kobi Towers was America's fault. I suppose wherever else we have been attcked since the early 1970's was America's fault as well. I suppose our own existence is America's fault.

In a way, these "smart ones" are correct but for the wrong reasons. America has been attacked and we are now in this war because we stand in the way of the reinstallation of the Caliphate. Deny that fact if you will as much as you will...it won't make it any more false. OBL and Company have said that Baghdad will be the Capital City of The Caliphate.

These "smart ones" seem to think their fancy words covers up their Cut and Run rhetoric but even this lowly blogger saw right through the BS.

The rest of the article which is accessible gets worse in its defective Leftinistra slanted rhetoric and if one is susceptible to the gag reflex, be fore-warned.

For the correct analogy, I would go with this article. "The Left Loses the Vietnam War"

This article is written in English and is a very good read. The article ends with this:

So the twin pillars of the contemporary Islamist threat--al-Qaeda and the Islamic Republic of Iran--owe their origins to the collapse of American power in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. What new disasters wait to be spawned in the aftermath of a self-imposed defeat in Iraq?

Samuel Johnson is supposed to have said that nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of a hanging. What will the American people do when they are required to meditate seriously, for the first time, on the full, concrete ramifications of a defeat in Iraq? What will they think when they hear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad boasting of Iran's eagerness to fill the "power vacuum" that will open up in Iraq after the "collapse" of "the political power of the occupiers"?

Will the American people--offered even the glimmer of a possible victory by the success of the "surge"--decline to repeat the painful history of Vietnam?

If they do, then the left will finally have lost the Vietnam War.

Read the beginning...it will not disappoint.